There is a show on TV that films auctions at public storage places. I’ve watched only a few of those shows and am always shocked with what the highest bidder ends up with. Back in the 60′s my family moved to a suburb of Los Angeles. The population was 7,000 and as far as I can remember there was not one storage place in the whole town. Fast forward 5 decades and there are storage units everywhere. What changed?
Why do we have more stuff now than we did then? Are we happier with more stuff? What is the cost of clutter?
What’s Your Reason?
There are good reasons to store our belongings. Just last year my mom moved and had to store stuff for two months until she could move it all into her new house. I had a son who, while on deployment had to store his belongings. Even my own family paid for storage while we were out of the country for several years. But you have to wonder, how much money is paid to store junk that we will never use.
The truth is when we came back and emptied our storage unit much of it ended up in the trash or the goodwill. I could kick myself for not getting rid of some of it earlier but we really didn’t know how long we would be out the country so we kept it.
All That Glitters Is Not Gold
There are great bargains and eye catching signs out there like.. first month free or first month of storage for $1.oo. Again, sometimes it is necessary, but we all know much of what is stored will never be used by anyone.
Storage can be tricky as well. We stored things like pillows and blankets and clearly didn’t know how to pack away because when we unpacked the smell was not good. The money that we could have saved by not storing could have furnished an entire house of new stuff.
Just look around your neighborhood and see how many cars can’t pull into the garages because it is cluttered with stuff. We build and buy larger homes that cost a lot of money because of this illusion that we need more space to hold more stuff that we don’t use or need.
Whether you pay for outside storage or not you are paying for space. Your mortgage, your rent or your storage bill. Maybe it is time to rethink what you are storing.
Remember it all costs money.
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